Chapter 78
Chapter 78
He opened the door. He hadn’t known then that he would end up smashing this door on New Year’s Eve. The room was empty. Only the abandoned furniture remained, occupying their spaces forlornly. For Isaac, the worst had been when Arietta lay unconscious in a coma. But today felt like discovering a new, lower depth of that worst. He circled the empty room.
The quiet coolness of the room chilled his heart further. He slowly surveyed the room. The paintings, each stroke a testament to the artist’s skill. The smooth, sculpted figures. The antique furniture. The intricately crafted jewels. Objects that only Arietta, among the inhabitants of the Glass Dome mansion, could truly appreciate, glimmered. Even with the room’s owner absent, the carefully selected and arranged objects clearly revealed her presence.
“Ha,” Isaac exhaled a short breath. He stopped and curled up on the bed where he had often slept with Arietta. The mattress was still plush, but it felt empty. The woman who would hold him whenever he felt like this was gone. He felt her absence keenly. No matter how he thought about it, this was the worst. There couldn’t possibly be anything worse than this.
Thinking so, Isaac closed his eyes. Twenty years of his life had been dominated by Arietta. For twenty years, she had shaken his life like a waking nightmare. Where the horror had been, a hole in her shape remained. That empty hole was now filling with emptiness. Even if he tried to tell himself it was no longer his concern.
Even if he tried to tell himself he was finally free of her. Such a shift in thinking felt like denying a self-evident truth. Arietta was a trap. Isaac had finally freed himself, but the wounds from the trap remained, bleeding. She had taken something from him. Something he couldn’t name, something that could never be replaced.
“Whatever,” Isaac muttered to himself, eyes still closed. “She’ll just end up adrift again.”
The Sky City’s Relic Investigation Team wouldn’t be staying much longer. That meant Arietta’s survival strategy of clinging to Benjamin had a rapidly approaching expiration date. Isaac knew the Sky City people well. The Relic Investigation Team members sometimes dallied with the women of the Downstream. They’d sweet-talk them, promising the world, but when the time came, they’d board their airships as if nothing had happened, leaving the women behind.
They knew better than anyone how they’d be treated if they brought someone from the Downstream back to Sky City. The Sky City folk always came to their senses just before takeoff. Even if the man was completely smitten with Arietta now, things would be different on the day the airship departed.
He, like the other Relic Investigation Team members, would coldly turn his back on Arietta as if she were a stranger and board the airship. All Isaac had to do was wait. Until then. He wouldn’t provoke the young fool’s pride. And then, whether he waited for her pleas… or captured and confined her… He would have Arietta back in his grasp.
Isaac lay flat on his back, staring at the ceiling. This place had been built solely for Arietta. Not just this annex, but the entire Glass Dome mansion. Isaac didn’t need such a grand, cumbersome dome. He had a constitution that could endure the pollution for a long time, and after becoming a test subject and obtaining his current body, for some reason, he no longer needed purification at all. Yet, Isaac had made a deal with Sky City and built this enormous mansion.
Capping it with a dome and filling it with ornate decorations to mimic the upper-class society of the sky had been entirely for Arietta. Because she was fragile.
Discussion
0 CommentsNo comments yet.